After a discussion with a friend where he mentioned the book, I recently started back into Hans Kung'
Theology for the Third Millennium, which I had somehow put down a few pages in and never picked back up until now. It's a great read and I thought I'd share some out-of-context quotes this morning so you could catch a small glimpse for yourself. You'll notice these are about the Bible and it's authority, which is something I'm currently re-working through:
"A Yes to the Bible, then, but - along with many Protestant theologians - an equally decisive No to the sort of biblicism that makes an idol of the literal text and rejects all criticism of the Bible as unevangelical, for the sake of a supposedly Protestant orthodoxy. The Protestant theologian too has not only the right but the duty to distinguish between testimonies that are clear and less clear, stronger and weaker, original and derivative, central and peripheral, lucid and obscure, testimonies that for all they have in common can diverge, contrast, and partially contradict one another.
Protestant theologians too - but others as well - thus have the right and the duty to do conscientious
biblical criticism: textual and literary criticism, historical and theological criticism. This will not weaken the authority of the Bible, but make its light shine out anew."
(page 61)
"The writings collected in the New Testament canon do not form any sort of 'doctrinal unit.' It was not the Reformers but only the Lutheran and Reformed denominational churches, that taught the doctrinal unity of Scripture, a doctrinal system of statements from Scripture; plucked, that is, from the whole Scripture, whether in a more biblicist or more dogmatic fashion."
(page 69)
"He [Jesus] in person is the 'canon before the canon,' the 'center of Scripture,' the 'Gospel' itself... Every new age can tell the good news about this Christ in an irreducibly new way, so that in principle no one may deny the Christian character of an epoch in church history - neither of the Middle Ages, nor of the present. In these complete processes of life in the church and of the history of theology, hard and fast positions have been broken open from His side, corections have managed to become necessary and possible, now once more in the upheaval of an epoch the origins of faith can speak to us in new immediacy, the challenging primal shape of Christian faith unexpectedly becomes more lucid to us today than the ways by which it was mediated over its long history. All of these things surely belong to the healthy and happy surprises of our time."
(page 99)
"In first-and-final human questions...the special Christian experiences or, rather, the Christian message, the Gospel, Jesus Christ himself,
acquires a normative meaning... The center of Scripture, the Christian message, the Gospel is he himself in person, the one who was experienced by the first Christian community as the Christ and was originally attested to in the New Testament - the living Jesus as he stands for God and man. And that is why for Christians the original testimony of this Christ, the New Testament in other words, is and remains the
norma normans for all postbiblical tradition."
(page 122)
